Ghosts

The unfinished apartment building is the novel's central conceit made literal: a structure suspended between blueprint and completion, inhabited by construction workers whose own economic situation is just as unfinished and provisional. The ghosts who wander its bare floors — dust-covered, casually present, feared by no one — aren't intrusions into this world so much as its logical extension: beings caught permanently between states, just like the building and just like the immigrant family living inside it. Aira never dramatizes the ghosts as uncanny. They're treated with the same deadpan attention as a stew being cooked or a family argument, and that flatness is the book's whole method — refusing to rank the supernatural above the domestic forces the reader to notice how strange the domestic already is.

Patri's invitation to the ghosts' New Year's party turns the novel's structural in-betweenness into a coming-of-age threshold: a teenage girl poised between childhood and adulthood is offered passage into another kind of unfinished state altogether. Aira's famous compositional method — writing forward at speed without revision, folding in whatever tangent or apparent inconsistency arises rather than correcting it — mirrors the ghosts' condition formally: a text that never resolves into a final, settled draft, staying suspended the way the building and its residents stay suspended. The mundane and the impossible sharing one flat plane isn't just a stylistic tic; it's Aira's argument that reality itself, for people living precariously, already has this quality of being incomplete and haunted.

Aira has described his method as a 'flight forward' — he drafts in longhand, rarely revises, and simply keeps writing through anything that in a more conventional process would prompt a rewrite. Ghosts reads like the product of that method: digressive riffs on construction techniques or family history sit beside the supernatural plot without any effort to smooth the transitions. The unrevised quality isn't sloppiness; it's a formal commitment to keeping the text itself unfinished, in sympathy with a building that never gets completed and ghosts who never fully arrive anywhere.

Raúl Viñas and his family occupy the construction site rather than the finished apartments they're guarding — a distinction Aira keeps quietly present throughout, since it means the family's domestic life (meals, arguments, a daughter's restlessness) plays out in the same bare, provisional rooms the ghosts drift through. Their labor secures a comfort that will belong to someone else once the building is finished and they move on to the next site, which gives their own condition an unfinished, transient quality well before any ghost enters the picture. The novel's supernatural element reads, in this light, less like an intrusion of the fantastic than like a magnification of a precarity the family is already living inside.